One Step Over the Border

by Stephen Bly

  Clouds stacked up against the Bighorn Mountains and blocked the stars in the eastern side of the night sky. Hap rubbed out a cramp in his thigh. He looped his hat over his knee and leaned his head back against the empty freezer. “Laramie, I started this day in Lander. New cologne and a clean shirt. This was going to be huge. Court Juanita… find happiness… settle down. Now look at me. Sittin’ in the dark with a carbine on my lap. Seems I took a wrong turn sometime today and I can’t go back.”

  Laramie watched the dark clouds roll over the stars. When he rubbed his shirt-covered arm, he could feel goosebumps. “You notice that’s the way life is? You never get to go back.”

  “Well, if I could do it over, I’d never have come to Cody. Shoot, I don’t think I would have dated that Juanita from Colorado, neither. I learned to stay away from girls more obsessive than I am. If I could go back, I’d spend more time with my dad. He died when I was thirteen. A massive heart attack at forty-two years old. That’s way too young. I always figured he had a lot to teach me and we just never got around to it. Kinda sad, ain’t it? How about you? If you had a chance to go back… where would it be?”

  “Are you getting philosophical on me?”

  “Just tryin’ to stay awake. Don’t you have a time you’d like to go back to?”

  “New Year’s Day, 1985.”

  “Now, that’s specific. What about it?”

  “I’d have clobbered my old man with a baseball bat, instead of letting him take it away from me.”

  Hap traced his finger along the cold, hard walnut carbine buttstock. “Did he get mean when he was drunk?”

  Laramie waved his arm to the east. “Did you see that lightning over in the Bighorns?”

  “You need to change the subject?” Hap pressed.

  When Laramie closed his eyes, he saw the streaks of blood mixed with tears on his mother’s face. “Yeah, I’m changing the subject. At least for now. Maybe someday, Hap. Is that fair enough?”

  “Partner, I’ll listen to anything you want to tell me. But I won’t hound you.”

  “And I’ll do the same for you.” Laramie cleared his throat. “Do we have a storm headed this way?”

  “Looks like it. You should have worn your hat,” Hap said.

  “I never wear a hat. Except in the arena and that’s because they make me.”

  “You’re a cowboy, but you don’t wear a hat? What’s the deal?”

  “Some guys can wear a hat; some can’t. I look funny in a hat.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Molli Peters, when I was twelve.”

  “Do you mean to tell me what some girl said when you were twelve still controls your life?”

  “How old were you when you started looking for your Juanita?” Laramie quizzed.

  “Twelve, but it’s completely different.”

  “Oh?”

  “Look, that night after I met her, when I was twelve, I prayed. I said, ‘Lord, I’m never goin’ to ask you for another thing as long as I live. I just want to marry my Juanita someday when I grow up.’”

  “So prayer makes your situation different?”

  “It’s in the Lord’s hands.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Laramie murmured.

  Hap raised the carbine and pointed it at the brightest star. “You do believe in God, don’t you?”

  “I suppose most everyone does. But that doesn’t mean I understand his ways.”

  “What are you thinkin’ of?” Hap asked.

  “Philippe.”

  “Juanita’s baby?”

  “Yeah, Juanita and good old Francis. That little guy hardly has a chance in life. What kind of world is this that he’s growin’ up in? He’s got violence and filth and constant tension. How can he make it?”

  “You blame God for that?” Hap asked.

  “Not exactly, but I truly don’t understand. I have a sister, Diana. She’s about three years older. She married Barry right out of high school. He got into computers and made so much money they can’t find enough ways of spending it.”

  “That’s a nice problem.”

  “They’ve got a big house near Seattle. Diana doesn’t need to work. So all she wants is to have kids.”

  “But they can’t?”

  Laramie sighed. “Nope. It’s not Barry; it’s her. She can’t bear children. My sis is a saint. She’s the sweetest, kindest, smartest lady I know. If I ever find one like my sis, I’ll marry her. But for the life of me, I don’t get why God above prevents her from having kids… and little Philippe is born in a home like this. There’s a whole lot of things like that I don’t comprehend.”

  “Here comes a rig,” Hap said.

  Laramie crouched forward. “Two headlights. It’s not a motorcycle.”

  “Maybe someone’s lost.” Hap sat cross-legged, carbine across his lap. “I think they’re turnin’ in here. Duck down.”

  “Is that a Harley in the back of the pickup?” Laramie whispered.

  A red bandanna do-rag around his head, Francis climbed out of the passenger side. He carried a sleeping Philippe.

  Juanita bounced out on the driver’s side, keys spinning on her fingers. “Honey, do you think we should tape some cardboard over that hole in the front window to keep the bugs out?”

  “Just pull the curtains, babe,” Francis replied. “I’ll repair it tomorrow. You might want to bring in the commode lid, though. I’ll put the baby to bed. He’s tired. He’s had a long day.”

  “We’ve all had a long day.”

  “Did you get it out of your system?” Francis asked.

  “Running away? Yeah… I think I did. How about you? Did you get your anger out?”

  “Nothin’ like slicin’ tires to relieve stress.”

  Hap prodded Laramie with the carbine. “Now’s your chance. You want the gun?”

  Laramie waved him away.

  Juanita and Francis paused in front of the busted screen door. Francis leaned down. Juanita threw her arm around him and kissed him on the lips. Then the three, and the black dog, disappeared into the house.

  Neither said much on the drive back to Greybull until they hit the thundershowers.

  “If it rains hard, they’ll wish they had that window fixed,” Hap finally offered.

  “I sat there most of the night thinking of all the things I was going to do to the guy, but I didn’t count on that.”

  “It’s a tough one to figure out.”

  “It’s still a mess. I don’t know how they can make it.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not our mess. I hope you learned a lesson from all of this.”

  “I learned that slashing tires relieves stress.”

  “You didn’t exactly slash them.”

  “Letting the air out and tossing away the valve cores was the best I could do. I should have carried my pocketknife,” Laramie said.

  “You should have let me blast the tires.”

  “I didn’t want to wake up the baby. But I’m glad I let the air out of the Harley, too.”

  Hap pushed his hat back. “What do you say, cowboy? We make a good team. You ready to rodeo?”

  “After today, I’m braced for anything.” Laramie rubbed the back of his neck. “Besides, I figure it can only get better from here.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Matamoros, Mexico, June 2006

  For almost twelve hundred miles the Rio Grande separates the state of Texas from Mexico, the country of arduous paths and tumultuous fortunes. But the nearer one gets to the river, the less separates the cultures. Laramie and Hap knew they sat close to the river. In a way, they were no more than one step over the border.

  “The only good thing I can say about this Juanita… she ain’t ugly. She’s got pretty eyes.” Hap wasn’t positive whether the gnawing in his stomach was due to nerves… or appetite. He pushed back his black beaver-felt cowboy hat to survey the crowded cantina. Most of the occupants had dark hair and dark brown eyes, all of them smelled like a hard day’s work, and almost all were men. It wa
s the kind of place where scars outnumbered tattoos, but just barely. The A la Luz de la Luna Camara flashed the first sign across the border offering “algo de comer”… something to eat.

  Laramie rubbed his unshaven chin and peered through the smoky cantina, then lowered his voice. “I agree with you there, but she’s rather… eh… large-boned, don’t you think?” He tried, but failed, to slide his glass across the sticky bar.

  Juanita’s multiringed fingers dwarfed her half-filled glass. Weak elastic strained to keep the scoop-neck scarlet peasant blouse on her shoulders. She leaned close to Hap and pursed her peppermint lips. “¿Qué dice tu amigo?”

  Laramie nudged Hap with his elbow, then spoke in a low monotone. “I’m glad she doesn’t understand English.”

  Perched between Juanita and Laramie, Hap leaned back on the battered wooden bar stool and studied the woman. “What he said was, ‘The Juanita I’m lookin’ for don’t need to buy two tickets just to fit on the bus to Del Rio.’”

  Like a bobcat let out of a cage, Juanita’s tight fist slammed into Hap’s chin, grin still plastered in place. His hat tumbled off. The back of his head forged against Laramie’s forehead like a twelve-pound sledgehammer on a cold anvil.

  Both men landed on the worn linoleum floor backside down. Laramie rolled to his hands and knees. Hap got lifted off the grungy barroom floor by two men who made robust Juanita seem petite. Hap struggled to pull his arms free, while Juanita’s second blow punctuated his stomach. By sheer strength of will, or blind luck, he turned sideways. Juanita’s kick landed on his hip instead of its intended location.

  Laramie jumped the shorter of the two men holding Hap. The man spun around so fast that he got tossed like ante into the middle of a Texas Hold ’Em table. Angry shouts and rib-bruising jabs greeted him.

  Now held by only one man, Hap ground the heel of his cowboy boot into a sandal-covered foot and jerked loose. With a scratchy CD of Freddy Fender singing “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” blaring in the background, he dove toward the poker table. A bulky hombre decided to demolish an oak chair into Laramie’s stunned expression. The chair missed, but several calloused knuckles looped him to the floor.

  Hap ducked a punch from the right. The flying chair splintered across the man behind him. He took two steps for what he thought was the door, but got clotheslined in the neck by big Juanita’s fleshy forearm. He gasped, hands on his knees, until someone’s roundhouse caught him in the chin and laid him flat on his back again.

  The saloon engulfed in a free-for-all, big Juanita took advantage of the inequality of the sexes to clobber one man after another. “Me los llevo a lo macho,” she bellowed.

  Hap spied Laramie crouched under the poker table. Broken glass sliced through the knees of his split jeans as he inched over to his partner. Angry screams, Spanish curses, and the crack of breaking bones roared in the battleground above them.

  “If you’re through visiting with this Juanita, I’m ready to go,” Laramie hollered.

  Hap deflected a flying claw hammer with a broken chair. “I was sorta hopin’ to take a leisurely stroll through Matamoros by moonlight.”

  Both cowboys winced at the sound of breaking glass on the table above their heads.

  “It’s the same moon as last night,” Laramie told him.

  Hap tossed the chair remnants out into the room. “I reckon the stroll can wait, but I never did get my order of buffalo wings.”

  A battered bar stool crashed into the table leg. Then a wave of beer from a broken pitcher cascaded off the table and splashed over their heads. Laramie rubbed his eyes on Hap’s shirttail. “We got to make it to the door without losing life or limb.”

  A lit cigar dropped to the floor in front of Hap, a yellowed tooth embedded in it. “I ain’t payin’ for buffalo wings that I didn’t get.”

  “Watch out, Hap. Your Juanita is headed this way.”

  “I told you, she ain’t my Juanita. And it ain’t a fair fight with her carryin’ a knife.”

  “Shoot, it’s no fair fight when she doesn’t have a knife.”

  Hap slammed his pointed boot into a red-faced man sprawled on the floor who was grabbing his ankles. “Hey, if you want us to go now, that’s fine with me. I know how you’re shy and don’t like crowds and meetin’ new folks.”

  Laramie scurried out on his hands and knees and took a shin to the ear. He slid across the floor.

  “The front door’s over here.” Hap edged through the shuffling feet of the cantina’s combatants.

  “Hap, no, not that way!” Laramie tottered to his feet and lurched toward his partner.

  Ducking a punch, Hap shoved the assailant into a white-haired man in a tattered three-piece suit. The old man broke a maple pool cue over the man’s head. Both men staggered to the floor.

  “Any door is a good door!” Hap kicked it open and dove inside, dragging Laramie by the collar. The door slammed and locked, and both men wheezed in the darkness.

  Mayhem muffled the music on the other side of the door as Hap felt a release from the iron grip of tension around his stomach. While hundreds of Juanitas danced in his mind, he felt the freedom of escape from this one.

  “Where are we?” Laramie gagged. “Smells like a…”

  Hap felt along the grimy wall until he found a light switch and flipped it on. A bare forty-watt bulb hung from a wire and flickered a glow that almost reached the floor. Water from an overflowing toilet flooded across his boots as a rat scampered for higher ground. “Must be the ladies room.”

  “Ladies room?” Laramie stared in a mirror as murky as water downstream from the herd. He dabbed at blood on his forehead. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. The men’s room ain’t this clean.”

  “I told you the front door was in the other direction.”

  “You want to go back out there?”

  “No, but I don’t want to die of suffocation either. Let’s see if that window will slide up.” Laramie shoved against the side of the two-by-two-foot window. “I bet it hasn’t been unfastened in a while.”

  “Well, it’s goin’ to open now.” Hap stepped up on the rim of the busted john and added his shove to Laramie’s push. The entire unit… casing, frame, sill, and window… tumbled to the hard-packed ground outside the cantina.

  Hap scaled the back of the toilet tank for a boost and dove out into the fresh air of the Rio Grande night. His thin, lanky partner followed. Both men lurched to their feet.

  “Can we make it to the truck without being ambushed?” Laramie asked.

  “I reckon we can meander across the parkin’ lot as if we don’t know nothin’ about no fight inside.”

  The moonlight glowed just bright enough to reveal their scrapes and bruises.

  “Sure, we can tell whoever stops us that we look this way because we got our spurs caught on the bumper of a Peterbilt that dragged us all the way down here from Corpus Christi.”

  Hap brushed off his black hat. “Wait, we got to go back. I didn’t pay my dadgum tab.”

  “No time to worry about money, partner. Lives are at stake here.”

  “There ain’t nobody ever goin’ to say I welched on a debt. I pay ever’ bill. You know that about me.”

  “Mail them a money order.”

  “Nope. I settle up with cash.”

  Laramie waved his long arm at the hole in the bathroom wall they just vacated. “Toss it into the ladies room.”

  “How do I know the owner will get it?”

  “How do you know he won’t? The door’s locked. Besides, he has to feed his rats sooner or later.”

  Hap dashed back to the hole in the wall and sailed a wadded-up ten-dollar bill and two ones through the opening. “I ain’t leavin’ them a tip,” he muttered.

  When morning broke, Laramie poked out his head from a sleeping bag. Hap crouched over a tiny mesquite fire, wearing only jeans and hat.

  “You painted up for war?”

  “Mercurochrome. Stops the bleedin’. Not easy to find these days,
but nothin’ works better.”

  Laramie pulled his long legs out and reached for his socks and boots. “I didn’t remember you getting cut that much.”

  “Thin skin is a family tradition.”

  “I always thought that was a figure of speech.”

  “In my family, it’s a painful reality.” Hap hung the long-sleeved black denim shirt on his back as if it were sunburned. He took great care with each snap.

  A live oak tree and the horse trailer blocked their view of the highway. It gave the camp a private feel. What grass had grown in the powdery yellowish dirt had long since turned brown. Even though the sun perched on the eastern horizon, a wispy, faded gray three-quarter moon stenciled the pale blue western sky.

  Hap ambled over to the horses tied to the trailer. He shoved a flake of hay in each of their feed buckets, then stroked the black gelding. “Good mornin’, Luke. You ready to get a taste of Texas? Bet you’d like to stretch your legs and chase a cow this mornin’. So would I, partner. You didn’t plan on livin’ in tight quarters this long.”

  Hap pondered how things turn out different from what a man plans. He had deliberated for years coming down to Texas and solving this thing with Juanita. But now he faced the undeniable fact that he didn’t have a real handle on how to find her. Laramie had often said it was all an excuse to avoid any relationship. Though those were cutting words, Hap decided maybe he was right.

  He asked for Luke’s right front hoof, then held it and studied the frog and shoe, trying to concentrate on equine care as his mind locked on his quest to find the childhood Juanita. He couldn’t explain why it ate at his soul or how it pushed him through every day’s activity. At times he felt trapped in a Broadway play beginning its nineteenth season. The same old lines, the same old scenes.

  He put down the hoof and tapped Luke’s right rear leg.

  Yet, he couldn’t release the dream. His heart still jumped when he recalled her voice. And when he got lost in the memory of that day, he gained a certain vitality, a feeling of being fully alive… that he didn’t experience any other time. Others told him it was puppy love. They said it would soon pass. After almost two decades, they had all been proven wrong.